When our web designer was creating LBCA’s site before we opened, she insisted that I blog. I told her that I hoped to be too busy to blog and was planning on having a monthly newsletter anyway. “You’ll need both” she assured me.

And so it’s happened, the clinic has been humming with nappers for the last year. Some people even think Schedulicity is broken when it shows no available treatment times, but it is simply a full book of appointments. The upside of being busy has led to clinic stability, allowed for 2 new jobs, along with lots and lots of treatments—over 8,000 since 2013. The downside is that there is less time to share stories about all the great things that happen at the clinic regularly.

In some ways it’s hard to believe that we’ve been open for two years and in others the slow roll of days is not surprising. Witnessing positive patient outcomes with frequent acupuncture never gets old and it’s been a pleasure to develop long-term relationships with people as their bodies change and health concerns shift over the years.

There’s a lot of vulnerability involved in seeking help and so much beauty watching a group of individuals healing together. Over the past months, the final three lines of James Wright’s poem, “A Blessing,” have come to me repeatedly, capturing the way I feel as the room fills and empties each day and patients come in to share their progress: “Suddenly I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.”

I am deeply grateful to this community for supporting this clinic and providing me, and others, with work that we love.